ShotTracker Nails Crucial NBA Coaches Partnership

August 4, 2015

12:30 pm

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I was out playing basketball with my Monday crew the other day, beating myself up over missing a lot of layups. I mean, it’s supposed to be the highest percentage shot to take in the game, so the expectation is that you make it.

However, one of my friends reassuringly brought up that the layup is actually the most missed shot in any given game of basketball. Go figure: it’s not the jump shot, the three point shot, or even free throws.

Obviously a big part of that boils down to numbers: if it’s the highest percentage shot players are going to take a lot of layups. However, it’s a double edged sword because a lot of players – like me – get lazy when taking the supposedly easy to make bucket.

Now, I’ve been like this for a long time and have always wanted to get better. So, when I first was introduced to the ShotTracker team based in Kansas City, KS, I was pretty excited to hear how they could help players up their shot percentages.

The one thing that stuck out to me most was how they made the player data actionable. That is, each and every aspect of the player’s shooting is filtered through the app and can be an incredibly strong coaching tool that provides macro and micro views of the team and players on it.

I vividly remember thinking that ShotTracker was going to get hot, and it was going to get hot fast. Sure enough, a few months after my meeting I heard from Davyeon Ross, TITLE, that they had partnered with NBA superstars who use the product regularly and saw a huge increase in their skills.

Now it’s time for ShotTracker to join the big leagues themselves. To that end they’ve partnered with the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), and the NABC has named ShotTracker their “Official Wearable Technology”.

“The National Association of Basketball Coaches is always looking for new technology, tools, and information that will help our membership and teams grows. ShotTracker is providing crucial technology for coaches and players to excel,” says Jim Haney, Executive Director of the NABC. “ShotTracker helps players improve, and with access to this shooting data coaches can more effectively develop their players and make more informed game-time decisions.”

It’s a brilliantly simple, but very difficult to engineer, technology that lets players set goals, complete exclusive workouts, and track all of their stats. You can see how valuable this information would be to a coach at any level, especially during the offseason.

In a 2015 survey of NABC coaches, ShotTracker saw that coaches were specifically requesting help with offseason training for a few reasons:

94 percent of coaches agree the offseason is as important as the regular season when it comes to skills improvement

91 percent of coaches wish their players focused more on fundamentals – like shooting – during the offseason

Only 32 percent of coaches are satisfied with the extent to which their players practice their skills enough during the off-season

Only 48 percent of coaches are satisfied with the skills improvement they see after the off-season

91 percent of coaches wish they had more visibility to their players’ off-season practice routines.

You have to understand, coaches have never had access to this kind of data surrounding their players. Further, they’ve rarely been able to piece it all together to see how the individual affects the whole and vice versa.

ShotTracker’s journey here shows how incredibly important it is to offer a comprehensive product that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Sure, it always helps to solve a problem that already exists, but when you can see the big picture and develop something that solves both current and future issues, you become the Michael Jordan of sports wearables: legendary.

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Will is a Senior Writer with Tech.Co, based out of America's Finest City: San Diego. He covers all territory West of the Mississippi river, digging deep for awesome local entrepreneurs, companies, and ideas. He's the resident Android junkie and will be happy to tell you why you should switch to the OS. When he's off the clock, Will focuses his literary talent on the art of creative writing...or you might find him surfing in Ocean Beach.
Follow Will on Twitter @WJS1988